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In a City of Reinvention, Genius Finds a Home

It was good to see New York getting its stride back when the latest batch of “genius awards” were announced on Tuesday by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. For a couple of years, the city had few winners and seemed to be slipping. The 2011 list, with 4 New Yorkers among the 22 grant recipients, is more like it.

The MacArthur people, based in Chicago, are not comfortable with “genius” being applied to their annual awards — worth $500,000 each, spread across five years. Their goal, they say, is simply to encourage innovative thought and recognize risk-takers in the arts and sciences. (The emphasis on creativity may explain why those dollars are usually not showered on newspaper columnists, politicians and others more accustomed to thinking inside the box.)

The MacArthur people are also disinclined to discuss the geographical distribution of the grants. But we are not above such parochial concerns, especially since New Yorkers more than hold their own most years.

With less than 3 percent of the country’s population, the city by our calculations has garnered 18 percent of the 850 awards handed out since the program began in 1981. If winners from other corners of New York State are included, that share rises to 21 percent. Only California, at 19 percent, is in the same league, and it has a much bigger population to work with than we do.

Do these numbers really mean anything? Not if the question is whether New Yorkers, by virtue of birthplace, are more brilliant than those in other places. There is scant evidence of that being true. (See above on newspaper columnists, politicians and so on.)

The MacArthurs, however, do reaffirm that the city was, is and presumably will long be a magnet for talented people eager to explore new ideas. The same may be said of some other cities, including university towns like Cambridge, Mass., or Berkeley, Calif., which also tend to be well represented in these grants.

As usual, most of the New York winners this year came from somewhere else.

“It is obviously a city of reinvention,” said Jad Abumrad, who is a co-host and producer of “Radiolab,” a program on WNYC that examines issues of philosophy and science.

Mr. Abumrad, 38, was born in Syracuse. “I think people come to New York with thoughts about manufacturing a new sense of themselves,” he said. “There is a kind of deep restlessness and irritation that people have with the way they used to be or the way things are always done.”

Sure, he could practice his craft elsewhere, Mr. Prieto said. “But there is a kind of adrenalin and inspiration that you get specifically from being around anything in New York,” he said. “There is a lot of movement. You make something noticeable in New York, and I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be noticeable for the rest of the world.” We seem to remember Sinatra belting out something to the same effect in that number you hear all the time.

For similar reasons, Alisa Weilerstein, a 29-year-old cellist, arrived from Cleveland in 2000. “It’s a world hub,” Ms. Weilerstein said of New York. “It seemed to have the highest concentration of exciting things going on in the arts, not only the performing arts but all kinds.”

The fourth winner from New York, Francisco Núñez, 46, grew up in Washington Heights. Mr. Núñez, a composer and founder of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, could not be reached on Tuesday. But we’re betting he would not disagree with an analogy offered by Mr. Abumrad.

“We once did a story on our show about how ants find food,” Mr. Abumrad recalled. “It’s a random wandering. If they bump into enough things, there’s a mathematical probability which emerges that they will find something.”

In densely populated and restless New York, “there’s a sheer magnitude of collision,” he said. “It creates a kind of probability that things are going to happen right in front of you that will put some new invention in your head, and then you’ll go from there.” To him, the city is “just amazing.”

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